They’re both driven by the same chip, the MAX7219, which can drive 64 LEDs, so perfect for both of these displays, and you can actually daisy chain up to 8 of them together and run them from the same pins. There is already a Node.js library that can run these, and it works fine (MAX7219) – it’s geared towards the 7 segment display and it works with the native SPI device on the Raspberry Pi.

But it is possible to run a MAX7219 chip without using the SPI device. You can ‘bit-bang’ the GPIOs – this is a way of sending digital data out of pins manually by setting them to high or low for each bit. It’s probably more performant to use the native SPI device but this method is perfectly fast enough for most applications, can be connected to any pins, can have multiple outputs, and is simpler to set up (as you don’t have to enable the SPI device on the Raspberry Pi).